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Hubble telescope looks deep into the Milky Way

Hubble's infrared vision pierced the dusty heart of our Milky Way galaxy to reveal more than half a million stars at its core. (NASA)

Hubble's infrared vision pierced the dusty heart of our Milky Way galaxy to reveal more than half a million stars at its core. (NASA)

Posted: Apr 01 2016 04:05PM CDT

The Hubble Space Telescope has peered deep into the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy, revealing a tapestry of more than half a million stars, NASA announced Thursday.

A stunning image shows the impressive array of stars. “Except for a few blue foreground stars, the stars are part of the Milky Way’s nuclear star cluster, the most massive and densest star cluster in our galaxy,” explained NASA, in a statement. “So packed with stars, it is equivalent to having a million suns crammed between us and our closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri.”

The center of the Milky Way is located 27,000 light-years away.

Experts used infrared technology to pierce through dust in our galaxy’s disk that obscured the star cluster. In the image, scientists translated infrared light, which is invisible to human eyes, into colors the eye can see. “The red stars are either embedded or shrouded by intervening dust,” said NASA, explaining that dense clouds of gas and dust are seen in silhouette, appearing dark against the bright background stars. “These clouds are so thick that even Hubble’s infrared capability could not penetrate them,” it said.

The picture, which spans 50 light-years across, is a mosaic stitched from nine separate images from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. ‘The “snowstorm” of stars in the image is just the tip of the iceberg: Astronomers estimate that about 10 million stars in this cluster are too faint to be captured in this image,” said NASA.

The space agency explains that the star cluster surrounds the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, which is about 4 million times the mass of our sun.

The Hubble space telescope, which was launched by NASA in 1990, celebrated its 25th anniversary last year. The telescope is operated by NASA and the European Space Agency.